The 'open letter' campain to get the Human Brain Project re-evaluated by the European Commitee finally payed off. The three-headed executive committee (headed by Henry Markram) has been suspended, including their voting rights in the board of directors, where they where also seated.

The Human Brain Project, a large scale Cognitive Science research project in Europe, received an incredible 1 Bln. Euro in funding to be spend over the next ten years (100 Mln. annually). However, opposition has been mounting because of the narrow scope of the project, Artificial Neural Networks, basically blocking any other non-ANN related Cognitive Research having access to European funding. Close to 200 (and counting) scientists in Europe have signed an open letter that basically asks to re-evaluate the Human Brain Project and redistribute its funding in a more granular way across Cognitive Research projects.

The Xprize foundation, together with TED, have launched the AI Xprize. It can be seen as an extended Turing-test, where a machine intelligence has to prove it can function like a human. In this case the machine has to function like a very intelligent human, capable of giving a TED presentation and answering a few questions about the presentation afterwards.